That movie was based upon reality due to the fact that the director, Stanley Kubrick, wanted to portray something realistic considering that there were real spacecraft going to real places (like the Moon) at the time he was making and released the film. Most other "science fiction" movies gloss over this reality in a horrible way. The only time you get something action packed is when something goes horribly wrong... and perhaps at launch when huge amounts of energy are being released.

Then again do you enjoy watching videos of your father parking his car in the driveway?

There is a reason it looks like 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie was based upon reality due to the fact that the director, Stanley Kubrick, wanted to portray something realistic considering that there were real spacecraft going to real places (like the Moon) at the time he was making and released the film.

Compare 2001 with Apollo 13. None of Apollo 13 was boring, and it was as accurate a depiction of the actual event that they could do. They even shot the in-capsule space scenes in the Vomit Comet. What ma

But then again, in Apollo 13, something did go horribly wrong. It was nip and tuck several times whether or not they would survive. Had the mission gone as planned, it would have been quite boring, and they never would have made a movie of it. Don't forget that by the later Apollo missions there was practically no TV coverage at all. Though there was good TV coverage of the Apollo 17 liftoff from the moon, since that was the first time it could ever be seen live. I certainly was glued to the screen, at

The slowest space scene in Apollo 13 was when the command+service module separated from the 3rd stage, then flipped 180 degrees to dock with and extract the lunar module. The whole scene took a minute or so, with tense music accompaniment.

In reality it would've taken much longer; on Apollo 17 it took 15 minutes just to dock, and some more time to check everything before extraction. On Apollo 14 it took six attempts and over two hours, before they finally docked successfully. Apollo 13 is one of my favourite movies, but it's still Hollywood entertainment, with pacing and embellishments to match, and not a documentary or realistic depiction of events.

The video capture of Dragon is far more like 2001, for example the two scenes where space pods are deployed. In both cases you can say the model shots lasted way too long, but that's Teancum's point: it's reality, or pretty close to it in the case of 2001, so naturally they are both "slow".

What made parts of 2001 boring was the model shots, which lasted way too long. It wasn't the story, but how the story was told.

Yes, and the way it was told was integral to the story being told, and it was told in a perfect way. It was slow, it was deliberate, it was quiet and brooding, it was space travel. This was reflected in a lot more than just the model shots.

I won't tell you it wasn't boring. I don't find it boring at all, but I certainly can understand how you could.

But 2001 shot like Apollo 13 would not have been better. It would have been a much worse movie. Apollo 13 was done right for what it was, which is not what

That movie was based upon reality due to the fact that the director, Stanley Kubrick, wanted to portray something realistic considering that there were real spacecraft going to real places (like the Moon) at the time he was making and released the film. Most other "science fiction" movies gloss over this reality in a horrible way. The only time you get something action packed is when something goes horribly wrong... and perhaps at launch when huge amounts of energy are being released.

Then again do you enjoy watching videos of your father parking his car in the driveway?

While it's most convenient to have superpower governments concentrate wealth and use their military research to make space exploration possible, humanity's need for space exploration interprets a lack of funding as an obstacle and routes around it.

The real challenge now is finding a profit model. For the time being, space flight will be used to ferry celebrities into outer orbit, but in the future, our species will need to discover either outright profit or some way to subsidize the exploration of space its

There will never be a profit model for exploration - Or, if there is one, the profits will be so many generations into the future to make it not worthwhile calculating (mining unobtainium on asteroids or on Pandora 300 years from now). Will there be profit in space travel one day? Sure - But not exploration.

Nonsense. You think the Americas were explored just because of curiosity? No, it was because people were exploring FOR something. Land, resources, minerals, etc. They didn't always know what they would find and they had to be flexible but they didn't go exploring just for the heck of it. Oil and mining companies explore for mineral wealth all the time. You can do exploration with a perfectly sensible profit model. The limitations to space exploration are economic and technological but not the lack of

The 'new world' isn't a valid comparison to space travel. The new world was able to be explored and exploited with a good ROI with techology available at that time. We have no means today to go 'explore' Alpha Centauri to see if there's anything there worth exploiting, and certainly no means to bring anything back - And no investor is going to fund such a thing because you won't see returns for 300 years. Will the free market take us to the moon? Probably, eventually, but not to deep space.

Humanity will live on ships in space. Not just on planets. The ships will recycle to degrees you never thought possible: purifying waste, reusing vitamins and minerals and using photosynthesis or similar chemical reactions to get energy from the most widely available energy sources.

Landing on a rock is all well and good, but space travel should not be about how far you can go. It should be about understanding that movement little-by-little will happen. If we find a way to travel at the speeds

The entire company, personnel, administration and construction facilities and every rocket launched to date including all failures for spacex is less than one nuclear submarine. And the company is pulling a profit. Where it gets its funds doesn't matter. What matters is that it is doing it as a company.

You do realize that a fair chunk of the development cost was paid by SpaceX. NASA subsidized the development of Falcon 9 and Dragon, but only with set payments when set milestones had been achieved, they didn't just write a blank check and say 'go build us a rocket!'. Read up on the COTS (round 1 and round 2) and CCDev programs before spewing disinformation.

The development of Falcon 9 was paid by NASA. You are correct that NASA contracting does not work by cutting a large check and saying "tell us when you're done": contracts have set milestones with incremental payments as work is accomplished. However, these milestones are for things like passing critical design review. Even before the first flight of Falcon-9, they had already received $248 million dollars of NASA funding.(http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/453605main_Commercial_Space_M

Do you really think that SpaceX developed all of Falcon 9 with just $248M? That also covers Falcon-1. SpaceX spent around $500 million through the first launch of Falcon 9. Rockets are expensive. I'm pretty sure if NASA could have developed a rocket for $250 million they would have done it a long time ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacex#Funding [wikipedia.org]

Elon Musk is making a big deal about the fact that the majority of his flight manifest for the future is for non-government commercial payloads. One of the reasons why the Orbcomm satellite was a big deal is in part that SpaceX needs to go through that backlog of payloads and get stuff into space.

That the satellite didn't get to where it was supposed to be at was a huge blow, but it is the kind of thing that SpaceX will be doing more of in the future.

Huge blow? It's a test satellite. It'll do fine in a lower orbit. Sure it won't last very long there (1 year or so I'd think), but it wasn't meant to last very long anyway. Sure it was meant to last longer, but they can do most of the intended tests at the present orbit, I'd think.

SpaceX didn't meet the terms of the original contract. I'm sure there are some escape clauses and other legal language that will absolve SpaceX of liability in that case, and it should be noted that SpaceX did have the technical capability of completing the contract... NASA simply wouldn't let them relight the 2nd stage to push the Orbcomm satellite into a higher orbit. NASA's rationale for denying the 2nd burn of the upper stage of the Falcon 9 may even be reasonable, but unfortunately the satellite didn

Are secondary customers going to always get the shaft with NASA as a primary customer?

Yes. That's what happens with 'secondary' customers. They don't pay much at all. They get a sort-of free ride with the proviso that the primary customer is well, primary. I'm sure that has been thought through rather carefully by SpaceX, Orbcomm and NASA. Dozens of meetings. Thousands of emails. It's pretty normal these days. How to get into orbit on the cheap. You don't get the window seat and you get bumped often.

IIRC, it's the only rocket that can lose an engine or two and still complete it's primary mission. The last rocket that could do that was the Saturn V.

Great, but they've had 1 engine out in 2 launches. It's fantastic that they have demonstrated that redundancy but at this point in time it's a terrible demonstration of reliability. If we extrapolate a bit (and I'm not a great statistics guy) they should be expecting a dual engine failure about 1/4 of launches and a triple failure probably around 1/10 launch

One engine failure in four Falcon 9 launches, not two. The vehicle has done a test flight with a dummy payload, launched a proper Dragon for a two orbit mission, and now launched two Dragons to the ISS.

SpaceX has had two significant engine failures out of 45 Merlin 1 engines that have been fired for attempted spaceflight missions, with a couple other mishaps including an unfortunate smashing together of the 1st and 2nd stages of a Falcon 1. The first engine was a major screw-up because the engineers in charge forgot to account for galvanometric corrosion... and the engine fell apart in the first few seconds of flight in a spectacular fashion. Arguably SpaceX has learned a whole lot from that initial inc

I thought I read that they had an engine failure in last May's launch, too.

Also, can the Falcon 9 fly one-engine-down from any point after launch? The GP mentions the Saturn V being able to run one-engine-down, but that was only after a certain point into the flight. They needed all 5 F-1s for at least the first minute or two.

The space shuttle could also run one-engine-down, after a certain point during the launch. I believe I also remember hearing them mark a two-engine-down point, where they could comp

This is Slashdot - I was just being lazy, and this is one place to do it. Besides, on other sub-threads there was such amazement at one-engine-down operation, and incorrect statements like, "We haven't been able to do that since the Saturn V."

I'm surprised to see that the Falcon can complete the entire mission on 8 engines from any point. That says that they've paid a significant weight penalty to achieve that redundancy. NASA vehicles have only been able to declare an engine (or two) redundant after a c

At this point in time it's nothing of the sort. You can't reliably predict from merely the success rate (engine OK vs. engine lost) of those two launches any sort of an expected failure rate, even if you narrow it down to certain failure modes. You're not only "not a great statistics guy", you never bothered to learn the basics. It's not hard, you just didn't try, that's all.

If we extrapolate a bit (and I'm not a great statistics guy) they should be expecting a dual engine failure about 1/4 of launches and a triple failure probably around 1/10 launches. I doubt they can cope with that.

Oh my god that's worse than the math that was done in the last thread.

You can't go from "odds that at least one engine has failed in a test" to "odds that two engines will fail in a test" like that. You have to start with the engine failure rate, which is 1 of 9 engines in 4 launches, or 1/36. And no the odds of two engines failing is not 2/36.

Soyuz was docking automatically with the ISS in 1970? You've answered your own question. Soyuz has been around a long time. The bugs have been worked out (for the most part). Dragon has been to the ISS twice and has been in operation for only a year or so. There's no reason to rush automatic docking and a huge reason to not rush it. You know, breaking the ISS and killing everyone inside if it goes wrong. ISS crashing to earth crushing a family of 20.

One thing that you will find is that Soyuz is incapable of sending up larger cargo. In particular, they can not send up a space rack. That is because the opening of their docking mechanism is quite a bit smaller than both NASA's docking AND berthing ports. Russia uses the APAS-89 which has.8M diameter. The Shuttle used APAS-95 docking which is bigger than APAS-89, but smaller than CBM.

At the point on the capsule to which the arm will attach, the three metal pieces, are they magnetic? If not, does the arm have "fingers" which latch on to those points? Doesn't the act of pressing against the capsule to capture it invoke Newton's Law of opposite and equal reactions?

Why only one robot arm? Wouldn't it be better to have two arms so you don't apply as much torque to the one arm and make it easier to guide the capsule in?

I'm presuming with the use of maneuvering jets they were able to get the

1. The capsule has quite a bit of inertia, so if you nudge it slightly, it will only react, well, slightly. There, all nice and qualitative, no math involved:)

2. The latching mechanism is designed to have effectively zero mating force. The mating force comes from actuators on the robot arm. Once the grappler is in position (prior to any contact), it will pull the Dragon in, not push on it. Again, qualitatively speaking and ignoring some details.

I seem to be wrong, according to wikipedia, there was demo flight [wikipedia.org] in May, my memory ain't what it used to be. I guess since that is classed as a test rather than a supply mission, hence the "first" in TFA.

Yes, this follows a long trend of marketing hyperbole and rationalization. For example, a car is voted "best in its class," say the ads. The ads don't explain that the "class" is carefully gerrymandered to only include two models, one of which has been out of production for a decade. I've taught my daughter that every adjective is making the marketing claim less impressive, not more impressive. It may very well be the best four-wheel cross-over sport utility soft-topped off-road casual zero-emission vehicle built in North America, but that's not saying much.

It's more important to know who designated the vehicle "best in its class". There are some classes that are easy, like low-midline compacts, luxury compacts, low-midline mid-size, luxury mid-size, low-midline full-size, and luxury full-size. Those are classes that various consumer magazines and the like use, and are much more realistic.

Kudos for teaching your child skepticism early. That's important, and I wish that I'd learned that at a younger age than I did. I would have wasted less money on crapp

low-midline full-size? Do you seriously think consumers who buy these things know any of such class lingo?! It's all shit conjured for marketing purposes only. Every damn car out there is "best in X". It's all meaningless crap. You get in the car, drive in it, and figure out if it works for you. That's all there's to it. Car ads are pretty useless to the consumer.

It's the second time a Dragon has berthed with the ISS and delivered cargo. The first one occurred earlier this year and was a "demonstration" mission showing that it was possible. This was the first "real" mission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COTS_Demo_Flight_2#Payload [wikipedia.org]

It did deliver cargo last time, although the mission wasn't labeled as a cargo mission. IOW: last time, had they failed, the PR would have been different. It was "only a test". This time, it was a "resupply". Failed test vs. failed resupply -- pretty obvious PR slant.

Or accurate representation of actual mission classification and purpose. Something can be primarily a "test" but still doing something useful. But being a test, the last mission didn't include any supplies essential to station function. Just extra stuff since, test or no, it was going to the station anyway.

Right, in May they demonstrated docking to the Space Station, but it wasn't a supply mission, it was a launch and docking demonstration flight. That first flight did carry some miscellaneous stuff and some student experiments, but it wasn't carrying supplies critical to station operation.

As the summary says, this was the first actual contracted supply mission.

It is not hard for me to see how SpaceX could make a good profit and still be cheaper than NASA. I suspect they don't have pensions on their budget. I suspect people work more than 40 hours a week, and without an expectation of overtime. I suspect they don't have 50-year-old facilities scattered throughout states in a way that only makes sense once you consider congressional districts. And finally, if they fail they go out of business. When NASA fails, the schedule slips. I have a feeling that given this incentive, they will manage risk differently...

You make the false assumption that NASA is just a whole bunch of government employees. In reality there are thousands of contractors or employees of contractors working for NASA's goals, and they are likely paid the same in terms of salaried, overtime exempt employment contracts as any other high tech engineering employee.

If SpaceX did anything, it removed the, "must build something for the Shuttle in each state" mantra, so that things are built where they make sense to build them. There apparently had been a company that could have built solid rocket boosters for the shuttle as one-piece structures and barged them to Florida instead of multiple 14' segments with those demonized o-rings, but Utah's Thiokol built 'em instead and had to segment them to bring them by rail.

Simply ending the need to split things up stupidly is alone going to help the costs.

You make the false assumption that NASA is just a whole bunch of government employees.

Where did I make that assumption? Presumably at least some employees are government employees, and that is going to mean pension costs and productivity loss that SpaceX does not have.

As for government contractors... well, I worked for one and we had to keep very detailed records of our hours, and we were never allowed to work overtime. We actually got in trouble for staying late. It was frustrating, because you might only need another half of an hour to complete an experiment, but instead you had to clean i

The $133.3M/flight also includes the cost of the Dragon capsule and associated services and whatnot. $54M for a Falcon 9 launch is only for the rocket and associated services. NASA is paying for a lot more than just a rocket launch. In the end it's still a lot cheaper than a shuttle launch.

Of course the flight to the ISS includes the Dragon capsule... something missing from the $54 million price tag.

I think NASA is also paying a slight premium as they have been moved up ahead of other customers on the launch manifest and other "special treatment". Regardless, the price tag of $133 million is less than what other launch providers are asking, and even the $1.6 billion going to SpaceX is less than the $1.9 billion which Orbital Science is getting for their commercial resupply flights on the Ant

I think NASA is also paying a slight premium as they have been moved up ahead of other customers on the launch manifest and other "special treatment".

Well, considering that NASA paid for the development of the booster, which wouldn't even exist if NASA hadn't funded it, they didn't exactly "move up ahead of other customers"-- they were the first customer, and others came in after NASA demonstrated that it worked. I'd call "we bought in to this when it was just a concept, and paid to make it real" is a good reason for "special treatment".

SpaceX was already working on the development of the Falcon 9 before NASA got into the act.... so it is completely false that it wouldn't exist without NASA's involvement. I'll admit that NASA money was involved and that it is a subsidy of the development of the Falcon 9, but it wasn't a "cost-plus" project nor has NASA been involved with the design choices. NASA's involvement in the Falcon 9 has been more for general mission requirements and technology transfer as required by law... and to help promote t

Given that NASA was never in business of making rockets, I don't know what's your point, exactly. Oh, if you ask whether SpaceX provides services for a better price than Space Alliance or any other competitor out there: you bet. Vastly better price.

Berthing and Docking are essentially the same thing. The difference is that with docking, the spacecraft is active and the station is passive. The spacecraft lines itself up with the station and connects to it. With berthing, the station is active and the spacecraft is passive. The spacecraft hovers near the station and the station reaches over and grabs it with one of the Canadarms. In both cases, the spacecraft will wind up attached to one of the station's airlocks, so that personnel and cargo can be transferred.

Certainly. OrbComm certainly has reason to be disappointed but they would have known before hand that their payload was secondary to the Dragon capsule. On the other hand, had this been any other rocket their payload would have likely been lost. They at least have the opportunity to get some data out of their payload.

Certainly. OrbComm certainly has reason to be disappointed but they would have known before hand that their payload was secondary to the Dragon capsule.

I read on Reuters that OrbComm was still planning on launching 17 satellites on Falcon 9 rockets. On those launches, the satellite will be the primary payload. So they probably see the not-complete-failure of their test satellite launch as acceptable, and the complete-success-despite-engine-problems of the primary payload as a sign that they'll be fine for the rest of the launches.

Of course that's all partially dependent on the contract they have with SpaceX, but at the very least they don't feel strongly

The problem is that Orbcomm will have to do that boost using propellant on board the satellite... propellant that was intended to help with station keeping. The original goal was to use the upper stage of the Falcon 9 to perform that boost with a 2nd burn after the Dragon capsule was released. That has happened with other Falcon 9 flights, but the problem was that in theory the upper stage of the Falcon 9 after the burn could have been in a flight path that eventually would intersect with the ISS and pot

No, it would be a partial failure. In addition, this was a side load, not the main load. Since the real issue with this is that falcon was not allowed to burn the second stage longer (due to Russian rules on SpaceX). Had they been allowed to, then this likely would have made the orbit just fine.

I doubt that Orbcom is happy about, however, it appears that they are going to stay with SpaceX. My guess is that they will NOT want this launched again with an ISS load.